Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...

We present an experiment on strategic thinking and behavior of individuals and teams in oneshot normal-form games. Besides making choices, decision makers have to state their firstand second-order beliefs. We find that teams play the Nash strategy significantly more often, and their choices are...

Studies have shown that there are differences in cooperative behavior across countries. Furthermore, differences in the use and the reaction on the introduction of a norm enforcement mechansism have been documented in cross-cultural studies, recently. We present data which prove that stark...

We examine the influence of guilt and trust on the performance of credence goods markets. An expert can make a promise to a consumer first, whereupon the consumer can express her trust by paying an interaction price before the expert's provision and charging decisions. We argue that the expert's...

In his seminal 1970 book, The Gift Relationship, Richard Titmuss argued that monetary compensation for donating blood might crowd out the supply of blood donors. To test this claim we carry out a field experiment with three different treatments. In the first treatment subjects are given the...

A number of competing social preference models have been developed inspired by the evidence from economic experiments. We test the relative performance of some of these models using an experimental design that is aimed at capturing pure distributional concerns in a multi-person setting. We find...

By using hypothetical choice experiments, this paper presents evidence that individuals' concern for relative consumption depends on their relative consumption. Individuals with consumption levels above society's average consumption level tend to have, in general, lower concern for relative...

We examine whether and to what extent joint choices are more or less patient and time-consistent than individual choices in households. We use data from an artefactual field experiment where both individual and joint time preferences were elicited. We find a substantial shift from individual to...

In this paper, we conduct a high stake experiment in rural China to investigate the determinants of individual and joint decisions regarding intertemporal choices, and estimate the relative influence of spouses on the joint decisions. We use the Convex Time Budget experimental method to elicit...

It has recently been argued that giving is spontaneous while greed is calculated (Rand et al. 2012). If greed is calculated we would expect that cognitive load, which is assumed to reduce the influence of cognitive processes, should affect greed. In this paper we study both charitable giving and...